Colectivo Cherani is a political and artistic initiative made up of an intergenerational group of artists: Betel Cucué, Giovanni Fabián Guerrero, Francisco Huaroco Rosas, Ariel Pañeda, and Alain Silva Guardian. Its name refers to the place where the collective emerged, Cherán, a town located in the State of Michoacán, Mexico.

In 2011, the Purépecha community of Cherán began a political uprising against the violent threat of logging groups associated with organized crime. These groups entered through the forest armed and willing to deforest areas near the main water sources of the community. Cherán, with approximately 20,000 inhabitants, depends directly on these water sources and the forest for its consumption.

The groups of loggers were also linked to cases of extortion, homicide, and kidnapping, for which the community lived in a state of alert and indignation at the increase in violence. The organization of the uprising was led by women. On April 15, 2011, in the early hours of the morning, they blocked the entry of logging trucks and took some of the workers hostage. The objective was to stop the situation and expel the loggers, the police, and the politicians. After many confrontations, the town began a process of self-government. As Alejandra González Hernández and Victor Alfonzo Zertuche Cobos explain:

In January 2012, a democratic election was duly held, giving rise to the constitution of a new government figure: the first indigenous municipal government called “Mayor Council of Communal Government” (Concejo Mayor de Gobierno Comunal), composed of 12 “K’eris” (seniors) chosen among the “comuneros” and “comuneras” (members of the community), three for each of four districts. There is no hierarchy among them, that is to say, all occupy the same position within the communal government. They were appointed for a 3-year period 2012–2015. [1]

To support this new system, the existence of political parties was prohibited. For the four districts of Cherán, there is now a single town council and decisions are made collectively. Armed checkpoints were created and stationed by women and men from the community, whose task it is to safeguard the points of entry to the town. To deal with cases of minor crimes that occur in the community, a self-governed justice system was also created. It is called the Justice Procurement and Mediation Council. According to Giovanna Gasparello: “It is composed of eight people nominated by the bonfire assemblies and appointed by the neighborhood assemblies. Its work is divided into four areas: criminal, familial, civil, and civil protection and roads.” [2] According to Rubén, a member of the community interviewed by Gasparello in 2021, “mediation involves speaking to people’s consciences, and they are invited to understand; those who have committed an error are told to accept it publicly and commit to not doing it again. Our system is not punitive because, for starters, we do not even have a formal jail.” [3]

As part of this political process, Colectivo Cherani has created a cultural movement that seeks to recover and resignify the plurality of religious, artistic, and historical expressions of the Purépecha people. The collective is characterized by the use of various artistic techniques including painting, murals, graffiti, photography, video, and hand-embellished objects. The group has revitalized traditional forms of artmaking such as carving human and animal masks out of wood, creating toys such as tops, yo-yos, valeros, and pinolas by hand, embroidering napkins, tablecloths, blouses, and shirts, and crafting ornaments with flowers and colored papers.

Colectivo Cherani represents a paradigmatic case of art rooted in the social practice of autonomy, which functions not as mere representation, intellectualized critique, or performative reenactment, but as a vital component of their political project. Cherani’s work is driven by the plurality of voices it is composed of—its murals and projects involve the community and deal with issues that interest its members, such as the defense of natural resources and the preservation of historical memory. In countries such as Mexico, where the state apparatus has been co-opted by the political establishment and the forces of narcopower and corruption, Cherán and the work of Collectivo Cherani signal that other forms of social organization are not only possible but urgent, existing beyond the Nation-State and liberal justice systems. This form of social organization has been possible thanks to an unprecedented social mobilization rooted in Indigenous Purépecha solidarity and knowledge.

The Cherán territory has been recognized nationally and internationally by multiple people engaged in activism, cultural promotion, environmentalism, and communication, who have documented the different processes of struggle and organization of the movement. Cherani recalls the importance of autonomy, communal justice, self-government, resistance, and the role of art and ancestral Indigenous traditions. Their political project sustains the struggle of Indigenous people against contemporary forms of settler colonialism, state violence, and the continuous extraction of natural resources.

This essay was originally written in nomination of Colectivo Cherani’s ​​Cherán Cultural Center for the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice in the summer of 2022.

Fabiola Palacios is an art historian and social worker who studies contemporary art from Central America with a focus on gender and affect theory. Pablo José Ramírez is a Curator at the Hammer Museum. Previously, he was the inaugural Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern (2019–2023).